'Change type' dropdown has no options in Document Library

I have a fresh install of Community 3.2 on a 32-bit RHEL 5 server. I'm running Open Office 3.1.0, also freshly installed vi RPM - I installed all the RPMs. ooo.exe and ooo.user point to the correct place in the alfresco-global.properties file, and I don't see any errors in catalina.out or alfresco.log, even though I've turned up the open office connection logging in the log4j file, just success:

The problem is that when I click "change type" in the document library view of an individual file, say a text or a .xls file, there are no options available in the dropdown menu. Is there someplace I need to register the options? I haven't been able to find any documentation of this sort of problem anywhere.

I thought that the reason we need to install open office on the server running Alfresco was that open office gives us the "change types" option - so now we can convert a text file to a PDF or whatever. I got this impression from the installation document (page 22):

"Installing OpenOfficeWithin Alfresco, you can transform a document from one format to another, for example, a text file to aPDF file. To have access to these transformation facilities in Alfresco, you must install OpenOffice. This isoptional, and can be done any time after Alfresco is installed."

… so is using the "convert type" option correct to get this functionality?… also, is this really the only thing that open office is good for with alfresco?